Hard disk crash
Tags: Mac ILUG2008
What is one of the most horrible things that can happen while on a journey and in preparation for a presentation? Right, a crash of the hardware. Exactly that happens to me last week while I was in Dublin for ILUG 2008.
Together with Henning we had our presentation about the "Notes client feng shui" on friday. And because we get the OK for that session just 1,5 weeks before ILUG, we had to do some preparations while already in Dublin.
We saved our most recent presentation always to Dropbox to assure, that no data gets lost. But when we worked in our hotel room on wednesday, we didn't had a connection to Dropbox. So all the changes were unsaved. Yes, we know, we had about a dozen USB drives and several other choices, but we didn't made a backup on wednesday evening.
And then, when I tried to save all the stuff to Dropbox on thursday morning, the unexpected happened: the only thing my MacBook showed was a single folder with a blinking question mark.
Apple coveres that behavior in their knowledge base. But I realized very fast that my hard drive crashed because it makes a really strange sound when firing it on. And at least when Rob Novak said, that he knows this sound really good because his Mac's hard drive crashed like this twice, I faced that our latest updates to the presentation were gone.
Also all our tries to get to the disk were unsuccessfull: I tried it via FireWire with Bruce and by a USB backup of Bill's MacBook without getting more than the "beep" out of the disk. But thank you guys for your support (especially to Bill who let me his full backup with the words "but don't read my emails and look to my documents because otherwise I'll hunt you and kill you"
)!
So we had another night shift to get our presentation ready (I think there will be a post with the presentation in it).
When I arrived home yesterday, I took an external USB drive, linked it with my Mac, switched it on and tried to recover from my latest Time Machine backup. But there was the next problem. I'm using the Time Machine backup in an unsupported way over a file-share in my home network. And the recover option after booting from the system DVD just supports the "normal" Time Machine backup.
But after a installation of the system itself I could use the Migration Tool and choose my file-share backup as source for restore. And viola, after 7 or 8 hours my MacBook was back and online (with an external hard drive) like it was before. Great, great, great!
Now I'm waiting for the excellent Apple support here in Darmstadt to receive a new disk.
Update: Because of illness I wasn't at my "preferred" service center but my MacBook was repaired within an hour in another shop. After that I connected my yesterday created backup USB disk and the installation DVD, started from DVD and put the data from the USB disk to the new internal drive. It took 2 hours and now everything (!) is back up and running!
If you are an "old" Mac user this might be normal for you. But for me as a newbie and an old Windows user, this is absolutely exciting! There's no reason to buy Windows PC but another really good one to buy a Mac!
What is one of the most horrible things that can happen while on a journey and in preparation for a presentation? Right, a crash of the hardware. Exactly that happens to me last week while I was in Dublin for ILUG 2008.
Together with Henning we had our presentation about the "Notes client feng shui" on friday. And because we get the OK for that session just 1,5 weeks before ILUG, we had to do some preparations while already in Dublin.
We saved our most recent presentation always to Dropbox to assure, that no data gets lost. But when we worked in our hotel room on wednesday, we didn't had a connection to Dropbox. So all the changes were unsaved. Yes, we know, we had about a dozen USB drives and several other choices, but we didn't made a backup on wednesday evening.
And then, when I tried to save all the stuff to Dropbox on thursday morning, the unexpected happened: the only thing my MacBook showed was a single folder with a blinking question mark.
Apple coveres that behavior in their knowledge base. But I realized very fast that my hard drive crashed because it makes a really strange sound when firing it on. And at least when Rob Novak said, that he knows this sound really good because his Mac's hard drive crashed like this twice, I faced that our latest updates to the presentation were gone.
Also all our tries to get to the disk were unsuccessfull: I tried it via FireWire with Bruce and by a USB backup of Bill's MacBook without getting more than the "beep" out of the disk. But thank you guys for your support (especially to Bill who let me his full backup with the words "but don't read my emails and look to my documents because otherwise I'll hunt you and kill you"
)! So we had another night shift to get our presentation ready (I think there will be a post with the presentation in it).
When I arrived home yesterday, I took an external USB drive, linked it with my Mac, switched it on and tried to recover from my latest Time Machine backup. But there was the next problem. I'm using the Time Machine backup in an unsupported way over a file-share in my home network. And the recover option after booting from the system DVD just supports the "normal" Time Machine backup.
But after a installation of the system itself I could use the Migration Tool and choose my file-share backup as source for restore. And viola, after 7 or 8 hours my MacBook was back and online (with an external hard drive) like it was before. Great, great, great!
Now I'm waiting for the excellent Apple support here in Darmstadt to receive a new disk.
Update: Because of illness I wasn't at my "preferred" service center but my MacBook was repaired within an hour in another shop. After that I connected my yesterday created backup USB disk and the installation DVD, started from DVD and put the data from the USB disk to the new internal drive. It took 2 hours and now everything (!) is back up and running!
If you are an "old" Mac user this might be normal for you. But for me as a newbie and an old Windows user, this is absolutely exciting! There's no reason to buy Windows PC but another really good one to buy a Mac!
